President Obama’s plans to boost science and technology partnerships between the US and the Islamic world are stepping up a gear, as ‘science envoy’ Ahmed Zewail continues his tour of the Middle East.

The Nobel laureate and member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has spent the week in his birthplace – Egypt. He’s been talking to government ministers, academics, business leaders and entrepreneurs, in an attempt to forge new collaborations. A task force is expected to be making recommendations on more detailed areas of scientific cooperation between the US and Egypt at the end of the month.

All this glad-handing is part of Obama’s wider effort to improve relations with the Islamic world, which he mapped out in a speech at Cairo University last June.

Whatever else those in the Islamic world might think about the US, there’s certainly a healthy respect for its science and technology, so it seems like a promising area in which to build more bridges. In the future, the scheme could see US-funded centres of scientific excellence opining up across Africa, the Middle East and southeast Asia. But the first stage of the plan is to send science envoys to Islamic countries to whip up local support. Zewail is the first of the envoys to begin his tour – he heads to Ankara, Turkey, tonight, and then continues to Lebanon and Jordan.

The other science envoys named so far are Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science, and Elias Zerhouni, director of the US National Institutes of Health in 2002–08.